I like plot, and I also like a lack of plot. But, I would have called Three Days completely plotless, so what do I know? There are, like, three conversations, right? And none of them actually connects to any of the others? You might as well call the barking dog "plot."

I'm glad i watched this cuz it reminded me that what i had been hindsight-labeling as a kind of shapelessness to his movies is actually a deliberate, beautifully jagged primitivism that's ultimately liberating. he's a beautiful composer of images, but the images and the vantage points from which they're shot don't seem to originate from any artistic intentionality.

I think this is a large part of what makes me love Herzog so much. Well, and the weirdness/insanity. Like him claiming he hypnotized the entire cast for the duration of the shoot, to achieve a certain uniform acting style.

Heart of Glass is so so good. I'm pretty on the fence with Herzog but that movie was mindblowing.

_________________"your review shows me only that you dont understand anything about movies and that you are a untalented wanna bee filmmaker with no balls and no understanding what POSTAL is. you dont see courage because you are nothing. and no go to your mum and fuck her …because she cooks for you now since 30 years ..so she deserves it." — Uwe Boll

the first hour is a 5/5, the second a 3/5 or so. 7th Heaven has a similar issue for me where it blows its load on romantic silent-sublimity-symphonics early on and then, no matter how masterful its remainder, fails to keep me as engaged. but ok ok, this isn't comparable because there is nothing in Fanny & Allan's fling that has to do with true love, which is what makes this controversial/politically interesting, but its politics are only interesting when Estelle Brody is on-screen, embodying an existentially malleable proto-feminism solely through her performance (she reserves her smiles for herself and herself alone!). the parental deliberations and marriage arrangements and death glares between the adults are…excruciating? well, not quite, mainly cuz Mr. Hawthorne has some dimension to him, partly cuz of implied backstory (of which less was made than i hoped/expected) but also cuz Humberston Wright gives such a great performance! to me, what counted was the vacation rapture, the roller coaster POV shots, the throng of confetti'd dancers, the Welsh scenery, all that good stuff. the second half goes beyond being the kind of bonerkill that is necessitated by drama (no preliminary bliss goes unhindered by dramatic entanglements and conflicts in need of resolution…) to an over-immobilization of almost everything i thought was cinematically cool about the first half. but Brody does quite a lot to redeem it (should hunt for more of her work). sorry james i'll watch that Fregonese next and love it i'm sure!

Tue May 13, 2014 10:19 am

undinum

Re: in which mystery meat asks you for recs 2014 ed.

All understandable criticisms. Did you watch it with the In the Nursery score?

Tue May 13, 2014 10:25 am

jade_vine

Re: in which mystery meat asks you for recs 2014 ed.

I agree to a point although I still love the film. I think one of the great things about the film is that it manages to be engaging with dialogue even though it's a silent film, something I've rarely seen equalled. I gotta check out the In the Nursery score though.

interrupting the schedule (snapper i will get to you next don't worry) only because this is due back to the library tomorrow. as a novice to Japanese cinema, i still have no real clue what defines the norms of Japanese commercial cinema during the 50s (or any time, really), and so while this delirious kabuki artifice is new and trippy to me (only thing i've seen that compares is Kwaidan), i wonder how it would look to me if i had more of that contextual understanding and more familiarity with this kind of filmmaking. as it stands, i adore the colors in this. sometimes its garishly (in a good way) high-stylized, with harsh gels and filters slamming saturated blocks of red, green, and sunset orange onto the frame, but then at others it has a strange delicacy--those green/beige earth tones only slightly bronzed by the artificial sunlight are marvelous. i'm not quite sure if my brain knows how to get on the wavelength of the kabuki stuff; this wasn't affecting to me, but there were times that the music and narration cast a soothing/hypnotic effect on me, even if they didn't quite dramatically interlock. but this means little since i loved the aesthetics, as if the folk legend was just a vehicle for pumping my bloodstream full of colorful camera-swirling delights (not unlike Tatsuhei acting as the vehicle for his mother's snowed-in death at Narayama!). i'm endlessly curious to watch the Imamura version now, see his spin on the material.

Sat May 17, 2014 1:09 am

snapper

Re: in which mystery meat asks you for recs 2014 ed.

dw i would have rec'd that film if Trip hadn't already

This was pretty out-there and wild as an adaptation by studio standards of the 50s. Nothing was really being done with this kind of experimentation with artifice even in the (then-pretty-marginalised but developing) underground/political scene. Kinoshita's mid-50s were a period of pretty heavy experimentation for him, he was probably the most stylistically adventurous director working for Shochiku (or indeed any of the big guys) until Oshima got hired. And he was doing it even in the 40s, albeit in a more low-key style - some of his works from back then are quite similar to Borzage in their poeticism and montage

sorry this took me so long but i had shit to do. i liked this a lot. i didn't realize till after the fact that Rondi was a frequent Rossellini/Fellini collaborator--i was thinkin he was some random joe totally extricable from the Italian Cinematic Canon. that's why i went into this assuming it was going to be some cultish horror film handpicked from a plethora of Italian 60s horors but instead it ended up being a darker spin on the first episode of Rossellini's L'Amore, but a lot more ambiguous (though not necessarily better). it gets into more primitive incarnations of Catholicism and how pagan and culty and barbaric they are, and it hits a lot harder than more traditional polemics (though i wouldn't call this a polemic at all). i liked how devoid of psychology and character it was, just the facts of a case as perceived as such by a crazed religious community. her motivations or the real source of her agony or mental state--totally unimportant. though there was no doubt that she was suffering, and i liked that. it's a weird movie that doesn't seem to have a context or authorial perspective, totally insulated in the warped Catholic world it depicts. i loved how vertically oriented the town was and how that was integrated thematically with all these shots of her elevated over everyone/thing. good stuff snap.

Thu Jun 05, 2014 12:19 pm

snapper

Re: in which mystery meat asks you for recs 2014 ed.

I really dig the feminist implications of it. something i wrote years ago:

Quote:

Let's talk about the excellent Il demonio, the sophomore feature of Brunello Rondi (who wrote many of Fellini's best-known films like 8 1/2 and La dolce vita)!I Apparently this anticipates in many ways The Exorcist... although I wouldn't know because I haven't seen that film.

What seems on the surface a borderline exploitative "evil woman" picture takes on multiple degrees of meaning while you watch it. The story is of a farmer's daughter in a small rural village. After cursing an ex-lover so that he will "never forget her", she becomes known as a witch and is ostracized within the community. The beautiful Daliah Lavi (brilliantly) plays our anti/heroine, significantly named Purificazione, an interesting character that becomes something of a feminist figure by the film's end.

What Rondi seems to be advocating here is sexual freedom for women - like so many women in Italy Puri is treated as an object by the various men in her village, and this objectification is enforced further by the community's women. Differentiating this from any other schlocky horror of the time is the focus on Puri as a protagonist - we begin the film with her, and her mysterious activities are automatically a point of interest. Her first one-on-one interaction with another character - her ex-lover - reinforces this connect with the audience despite her "demonic" behaviour, as he immediately identifies himself as one of the "bad guys" by attacking her sexually and then beating her. There is a huge disconnect in the acting styles of Lavi and the rest of the cast - she is fiercely emotional and completely present in every scene, all of the other actors play their parts to a standard of Bressonian blankness. Each major male character is put at odds with Puri - her ex-lover beats her and ultimately kills her, a priest uses an exorcism ritual as an excuse to molest her, her father savagely beats her and a shepherd who finds her hiding amongst his flock ties her up and rapes her with complete lack of affect. The women aren't much better - near the end of the film she is taken in by a group of nuns who seem welcoming at first, but when they are perturbed by her curiosity towards a tree from which a man had hung himself, they block it with barbed wire and pictures of the Madonna. In a scene where Puri becomes "possessed", she pleads with the "demon" to let her go - these pleas are addressed straight to the camera, to the men in the audience who can only see women as virgins or whores. The sexual assault by invisible hands is an externalization of the everyday Italian attitude towards women and women's sexuality. Puri rejects both the men who want to rape her and the women who want to neuter her - her yearning for sexual freedom makes her an outcast, a "witch". In one amazing scene, we see half the village standing on a hillside praying for sun, as Puri lounges in a tree, eating an apple, diametrically opposed to the villagers in pose and attitude, scoffing at their impotent display of religious superstition. Sure enough, the dark clouds roll in.

At the end, it seems like Puri may have gotten her wish - returning to the village on the night of the bonfires, she meets her ex Anto and they make passionate (consensual) love. We are treated to a brilliant vista of mountains and valleys, and we cut to the pair lying on the hillside, grass rippling in the breeze. It's an idyllic scene. Anto touches her gently, only to stab her moments later. The feminine ideal is an idea self-destructive to the men that hold it as well as destructive for the women it represents. Anto is left helpless in the chaos of sexual repression and we end the film surveying Puri's lifeless but peaceful face.

my favorite rec so far, and a new favorite in general. kinda takes what Fassbinder did with Herr R. and intensifies the effect via an even greater detachment. between this and La Ceremonie, another film that achieves a kind of bourgeois horror, a naturalistic eruption of violence out of the drabbest, flattest, most seemingly ordinary circumstances, the spring wound by the slightest class and economic pressures--between these two films i 'get' Chabrol (or at least a part of what makes him so interesting), and i love him, i am disturbed by him. his characters are real but flat, convincing as people but unprobed as characters. suspense is cobbled together from ominous effects (that soundtrack, my god) but none of the usual Hitchcockian devices that might impose a 'meaning' or perspective on the narrative. i have no clue what i am anticipating, but i'm sickened when it happens. the first couple of shocks comprise a climax, but the successive surprises almost become a kind of catharsis, as we adopt the total disengagement of the protagonist from everything else that unfolds. conventionally, an eruption of violence within a cold civilized universe should bring emotional clarity, should cut through the bullshit. instead things only grow colder, more abstract. i'm trembling. oh god i loved this movie.

Tue Jun 17, 2014 10:57 am

charulata

Re: in which mystery meat asks you for recs 2014 ed.

WHOA! I completely missed this until now somehow! Your writeup so perfectly articulates why I love this movie... it's my favorite Chabrol. Yes to the flat but yet convincing characters and the goosebumps at the end. I am still trying to make sense of how I'm so invested in his films always and have a visceral reaction and yet, they are distancing.. absolutely. I am so glad you loved this as much as you did : ) It's a film that really shifted things for me in a way.

_________________"your review shows me only that you dont understand anything about movies and that you are a untalented wanna bee filmmaker with no balls and no understanding what POSTAL is. you dont see courage because you are nothing. and no go to your mum and fuck her …because she cooks for you now since 30 years ..so she deserves it." — Uwe Boll

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